"Not a lot of people did. That was the point." He turned onto the highway ramp. "But he was a big white guy in a sport coat, Naomi. Nobody ever looked at him twice. Nobody ever asked him if he was in the right line."
She did not answer that right away. The car merged onto the expressway and picked up speed. To the east, over Queens, the sky was beginning to go from black to a deep, bruised blue.
"That's sort of the point too," she said.
Eddie nodded slowly, as if she had confirmed something he had already suspected. He did not say anything else for the rest of the drive, and she was grateful to him for it.
She spent the forty minutes reading. Not the complaint file, which she had read enough times that she could have recited parts of it, but the operational summary for Flight 247. It was a habit from her dispatcher days. She liked to know the airplane she was getting on.
Meridian 247 was scheduled to depart JFK at 8:55 in the morning and arrive at London Heathrow at 8:50 that evening, local time. Daytime transatlantic flights were a small part of the network, but they were popular with business travelers who did not want to arrive in London exhausted after a night in the air, and the Signature cabin on 247 was usually full. The aircraft was one of the newly refitted twin-aisle jets, registration ending in MX, with sixteen Signature seats in four rows at the front, a premium economy cabin of thirty-two seats behind that, and a little over two hundred seats in economy. Today's flight was close to full. Signature was sold out.
The captain was Daniel Whitaker. She knew the name but not the face. Fourteen years with Meridian, came over from a regional carrier, check airman on the type, clean record. The first officer was Rosa Delgado. The purser in Signature was Graham Ellery, who had been with the airline for nineteen years and who had, according to the file, received eleven commendation letters from passengers in the last year, more than almost anyone in the inflight department. Most of them were from Sovereign members.
Sovereign was the top tier of Meridian's loyalty program. It was invitation-only. It had about four thousand members worldwide, most of them people who flew Meridian more than fifty times a year or who worked for companies that bought a great many Meridian tickets. They got free upgrades, priority everything, a dedicated phone line, and the unspoken understanding, among frontline staff, that they were to be kept happy at nearly any cost. Naomi had created the tier herself, two years ago, in one of her first decisions as chief executive, because the data showed that a small number of very loyal customers produced a very large share of the revenue, and it had seemed obvious that they should be treated well.
It had not occurred to her, then, to ask what it would mean for everyone else in the cabin. It was one of the things she had been thinking about lately, at night, when she could not sleep.
Eddie pulled up to the curb at Terminal Four at 6:31. The sky had gone pale over the parking garages. Jets were already lined up on the taxiways in the distance, their lights blinking, their engines a dull roar that came through the glass of the car windows like something felt more than heard.
"You want me to wait?" he asked.
"No. Go home and get some sleep. I'll call you from London."
He got out and came around to open her door anyway, the way he always did, even though she had told him for two years that he did not need to. She stepped out into the cold morning. The wind off the bay was sharp and smelled of jet fuel and salt. She pulled her coat closed over the cream suit.
"Naomi," Eddie said.
She turned.
"Whatever happens in there." He nodded toward the terminal doors. "You don't have to prove anything to anybody. You know that, right?"
"I know that," she said.
He looked at her the way her father used to look at her, a long patient look that did not quite believe her and did not quite need to. Then he got back in the car, and she picked up her bag and walked inside.
* * *
The Signature check-in area at Terminal Four was a short walk from the main hall, behind a frosted glass partition etched with the thin gold line of the Meridian livery. Naomi had approved the design herself. There were four desks finished in the same walnut veneer as the aircraft cabin, a long low bench upholstered in cream leather, a small arrangement of white orchids on a pedestal, and a uniformed attendant at the entrance whose job was to greet each passenger by name and direct them to a free desk. At this hour there were only two other passengers in the space, a man in a gray overcoat speaking quietly into his phone and an older woman sitting on the bench while her husband dealt with the bags.